What Global Warming? Too Much Ice Endangers Polar Bears

Environment: Polar bears are at risk, we've been told repeatedly, because man-made global warming is causing sea ice to disappear. But too much ice is also a problem, as some Alaskan polar bears might soon find out.

Polar bears, those cute and cuddly poster creatures for the climate change alarmists — recall the fraud behind the famous photograph of that unfortunate polar bear floating on an ice floe? — need sea ice. They use it to hunt for meals and to breed. In short, polar bears spend much of their lives on sea ice.

That life-giving bond, though, is allegedly in jeopardy. Since 2008, polar bears have been listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a decision that was based — of course! — on the specious assumption that man-made global warming is reducing sea ice.

Given that polar bears depend on sea ice, it would seem that more of it in a world without global warming would be better.

But apparently not.

An evolutionary biologist who has studied polar bears during her 35-year career says that thicker ice in the Southern Beaufort Sea along Alaska's Arctic coast is a threat to the big carnivores.

The additional ice can force the seals that polar bears feed on to move elsewhere because it's too deep for them to burrow breathing holes through.

"When those bears come out of their dens in the spring, they need to find seals right away because they will have gone six months without eating," biologist Susan J. Crockford told CNS News.

"If there are no seals, they have to go further out, where there's thinner ice."

Similar thick sea ice in 2004 and 2006 thinned the polar bear population in those years and resulted in low bear counts, said Crockford. It turns out that this thick spring ice condition that's so in conflict with global warming was "one of the pieces of evidence used to have the bears listed as 'threatened' in the U.S."

Truth has been the first casualty in the war to save the planet and the environmentalists' tale of polar bear woe has become a featured, though fallacious, argument.

But the myth was drilled so deeply into Americans' minds that the actual facts — which the media simply refuse to cover — get little traction.

Meanwhile, some observers are arguing that polar bear populations are thriving, not declining. That's debatable, but no more so than the entire global warming/climate change claim.

Environment: Polar bears are at risk, we've been told repeatedly, because man-made global warming is causing sea ice to disappear. But too much ice is also a problem, as some Alaskan polar bears might soon find out.

Polar bears, those cute and cuddly poster creatures for the climate change alarmists — recall the fraud behind the famous photograph of that unfortunate polar bear floating on an ice floe? — need sea ice. They use it to hunt for meals and to breed. In short, polar bears spend much of their lives on sea ice.

That life-giving bond, though, is allegedly in jeopardy. Since 2008, polar bears have been listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a decision that was based — of course! — on the specious assumption that man-made global warming is reducing sea ice.

Given that polar bears depend on sea ice, it would seem that more of it in a world without global warming would be better.

But apparently not.

An evolutionary biologist who has studied polar bears during her 35-year career says that thicker ice in the Southern Beaufort Sea along Alaska's Arctic coast is a threat to the big carnivores.

The additional ice can force the seals that polar bears feed on to move elsewhere because it's too deep for them to burrow breathing holes through.

"When those bears come out of their dens in the spring, they need to find seals right away because they will have gone six months without eating," biologist Susan J. Crockford told CNS News.

"If there are no seals, they have to go further out, where there's thinner ice."

Similar thick sea ice in 2004 and 2006 thinned the polar bear population in those years and resulted in low bear counts, said Crockford. It turns out that this thick spring ice condition that's so in conflict with global warming was "one of the pieces of evidence used to have the bears listed as 'threatened' in the U.S."

Truth has been the first casualty in the war to save the planet and the environmentalists' tale of polar bear woe has become a featured, though fallacious, argument.

But the myth was drilled so deeply into Americans' minds that the actual facts — which the media simply refuse to cover — get little traction.

Meanwhile, some observers are arguing that polar bear populations are thriving, not declining. That's debatable, but no more so than the entire global warming/climate change claim.

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